Диана Дуэйн - Wizard's Holiday

The way before them opened out again, the sound of their footsteps echoing against distant walls as it hadn’t done for some time. Esemeli stopped for a moment, and Kit behind It, and the three of them stood still on the shores of a vast cavern lake under a huge, high-domed ceiling dripping with more stalactites, which glowed. The water was a strange, milky blue color in Kit’s and Nita’s wizard-lights; and everything was absolutely still, not the slightest ripple of air touching that water. It was like blue glass, as solid-seeming as the crystalline surface of the Display had been.

“It looks too deep to wade,” Kit said.

“Indeed, I don’t know that it has a bottom,” Esemeli said. There was something strange about Its tone of voice. Nita glanced over at It and was surprised to see the uncertainty in Esemeli’s face and stance, normally so self-assured and lazily mocking. Maybe even It’s a little out of Its depth here, she thought.

But the next moment, Nita reminded herself once more that this was the Lone Power, or a fragment of It—immensely old, immensely powerful, and absolutely not to be trusted, no matter how secure you thought your hold over It might be. And just how sure am I about that? Nita thought.

There was another issue, too, one that she hadn’t mentioned to Kit, but that she suspected was going to come up in the near future and probably make him yell at her. Such strictures as the Binding Oath could not be one-sided; there was also a price to pay by the one doing the binding. What is bound eventually breaks loose, the manual said; the power of the binding is directly proportional to the power of the backlash. Sooner or later, Nita thought, this is going to come back to haunt me. Later, I hope…

And down they went through the darkness, and further down. Slowly, though, Nita noticed something strange beginning to happen. She had been starting to slow down, so that every now and then she would have to force herself to hurry to catch up with Kit and Esemeli, who had moved ahead. But now she was having less trouble keeping up, and this confused her. It’s not like I’m any less tired. I’m not! But walking was less trouble. And the further downward they continued, the less of a problem it became. Stranger still, she was starting to become aware of light filtering up from below them, as they continued downward through the caverns and passageways in the depths of the world. The caverns seemed brighter, somehow, though there was none of the glowing stone they’d seen earlier—

Nita followed Kit through one more exit from a vast cavern into one more new one, and put her foot down wrong on a place where the stone was uneven. She tripped, and thought she would fall.

She didn’t. She bounced, and came up on her feet again, and bounced once

more before she settled.

Hearing the scuffle of Nita losing her footing, Kit turned and saw her bounce. Behind him, Esemeli stopped, too, watching them.

G is less, Nita thought. “Kit,” she said. “Gravity’s decreasing!”

He stared at her. “How can it?” But then he jumped, and Nita saw him hang there briefly in the air before he came down.

“Maybe half a g,” Kit said. “How can this be happening?”

Nita shook her head. “Come on,” she said.

Esemeli turned to lead the way again. Kit and Nita went after, bouncing a little in an adaptation of the astronauts’ walk that everyone who went to the Moon learned, because until you did, you spent a lot of time lying face first in moondust. Esemeli, for Its own part, did not bounce; possibly It considered that beneath Its dignity.

They continued downward, and as they went, the gravity kept lessening, and the caverns all around them seemed progressively brighter, as if the stone of them was going translucent. This is beyond weird, Nita thought. It was nothing like the smothering heat and pressure that they should have been experiencing even fairly high up in a planet’s crust, let alone down into its mantle. This is definitely a complex-state environment, someone’s myth about the middle of the world coming true around us. Well, I don’t mind the lessened gravity, anyway…

That was fortunate, for it got less the deeper they went. Nita was grateful that she was used to it; she’d spent enough time on the Moon that she wasn’t troubled anymore by the human body’s usual reaction to microgravity, which was to complain bitterly that it wanted to throw up anything that had been eaten recently. Just as well, maybe, that I didn’t eat any breakfast this morning, Nita thought. Not that I felt like it. The pain and betrayal on Quelt’s face was still very much with her, and the anguished cry, “I thought you were good!”

They were becoming light enough now that it was becoming something of a difficulty to stay on the ground. Nita had to grab on to handholds in the stone of passages and tunnels they went through. But ahead of them, she could see a huge portal into another cavern, and there would be nothing to hold on to there. We’re going to fall up, Nita thought wearily. We’re going to fall into the sky. She had walked on air often enough in her work as a wizard, but falling was never entirely pleasant, whether you did it up or down. She swallowed, trying to keep her stomach under control; it was already trying to do backflips at the thought of what was coming—

They passed through that gigantic archway, and everything happened at once. Nita saw Kit’s shadow leap out behind him, and Esemeli’s as well—but Its was longer and far blacker than it should have been in that light. Before them lay a great broad plain with a high horizon…but the plain was above them, and the horizon was upside down.

Nita’s stomach flipped in earnest now. It was as if, for all the descending they’d been doing for all these weary hours, they had somehow come right around through the heart of things and out back on Alaalu’s surface again. Yet they hadn’t. They were still in the middle of the world: Nita knew this for sure as she looked at that horizon and realized that it didn’t stop—there was never any sky at the top of it,

just more and more land. And suspended in space before them, like a pillar buttressing the center of the world, was one great needle of stone, reaching down, or up, an incredible distance into that silvery-glowing, blinding sky. The confusion assailed Nita completely; she no longer could tell which way up or down was. And as if that confusion wasn’t all that was needed to complete the effect, it was then that the earth seemed to let go of them, and all three of them fell into the sky….

Fortunately, the fall itself partook to a certain extent of that dreamlike quality, so that what might otherwise have left Nita screaming in terror now left her in a muted state of astonishment and mild annoyance, like Alice falling down the rabbit hole. Up and up the three of them fell, and closer and closer to that peak of stone. “Toward that!” Esemeli cried; and Kit and Nita, having learned in passing a little about handling themselves when free-falling in atmosphere, spread out their arms and legs and did their best to maneuver themselves toward the top of the peak. They were falling up at enough speed for Nita to erect a personal-shield wizardry around herself; she was concerned about the possibility of slamming into the rocks. But she was pleased to find that the velocity of their fall seemed to be lessening as they got close to the top of that peak. By the time the haze of distance disappeared, they had slowed to a leisurely plummet; by the time they were within perhaps a mile of it, they had slowed to a glide. And as they came to the top, or the bottom of it—

Who knows what it is anymore? Nita thought, as she concentrated on somehow putting her feet flat down on stone instead of air. Let it be up or down just as it pleases. I only want to stand still!